Pieces
by noavail4
Summary: Handful of one-shot moments in and around Mayfield, because not everything can be seen and solved with 95 minutes and a talent show.
1. Chapter 1

They're looking at him.

He understands it exactly, the nature of each thought they have before they even think it. The way every move he makes, every gesture, every word, colors their unfolding understandings of his emergent pathology—how each separate part of him clicks in and out of focus as everyone who watches him tries on each different guess. When he moves to stand up, he sees them watch the cane. He dry swallows the first pill and watches the clinician's reactionary quirk: one eyebrow goes up and he knows what she's thinking. He does the next two pills with water, just in case.

Differential diagnosis, people. He sees them taking stock of the clues he can't help giving them, wonders how many of them have access to the file with the rest of it. Wonders how much Wilson told them—how much he himself said, during the intake interview that blurs into the first shakes of withdrawal in his post-detox memory. Thinks, irresistibly, of his own process with the patients—sifting out what's actually relevant from a pile of possible causes.

Drugs. Disability. Past abuse. Death.

Which one's the part that's more fucked than the others?


	2. Chapter 2

"Wilson." She reaches for him, grabs his arm as he turns for the door. He pivots.

"Don't…" The word hangs in the air while she searches for an idea to attach to it. She looks down, sighs, tries again.

"Don't…" Another pause, and then it all comes out. "When my father was dying, I…at the end of it all, in the hospital, he'd lost himself, completely. He'd throw things and shit the bed and scream because he thought he was someone else, somewhere else. The nurses hated him: I heard them complaining once at the station. So I wrote them a card, a thank you card. I didn't want to thank them—I just needed the space, to write down for them what he'd been before it happened. I had to write it down, I had to make them read it. I didn't want them to think he'd always just been that. Wilson, you have to tell them who he is. Who ELSE he is. Tell them what he is to you. To…us."

"What is he?"

"I don't know."

Wilson, five hours later. He walks House to the door, walks back to his car. Sits in it for two hours. Sneaks back to let them know.


	3. Chapter 3

"Not bad."

House's stomach flips in on itself when he hears her. His eyes snap open and his entire body jerks before he raises himself, warily, up in the bed. Leg hurts. Fuck it. There's nowhere to walk to anyway. He closes his eyes, but knows that won't work either.

Amber is standing in the doorway, scanning the room with an appraising eye. She raps her knuckles against the wall, slides long, graceful fingers on the threshold of the room, notes the high ceiling and thick-paned window between the beds . "Imposing. But homey. James had a lot of options---you think this was the best?"

"It's real. You're not. Go away."

"You always knew I wasn't real. Didn't keep you out of here."

He says nothing. When she pulls the bucket chair out from the desk and sits down facing him, still in the bed, he wonders. If Alvie came back from his session right now, where would he see the chair?

"It's not about logistics, House. It's not about third party observation."

"EVERYTHING right now is third party observation!" He surprises himself with how loudly he says it, and even though rationally, he knows he owes her nothing—knows there's not even something there to owe something to-- he still finds himself wanting to explain. "Everyone is watching me. Everyone has ideas. You're…you're outside me. My subconscious. I get that. But still. You're…dammit, the last thing I need is someone else to watch."

"You can't hide here, can you?" If he didn't know any better, it would almost sound sympathetic. "The people who know you outside—they see you two hours after you get out of bed. You don't let them know what it feels like, your leg before the meds kick in. And that's just the physical. What else do they see in here?"

"I'm not talking to you. You're not real. We're done." Reflexively, he grabs his thigh and winces, sliding down and turning over to lay facing the wall. Amber's breath is like a kiss in his ear, terrifying and gentle, speaking outside of and within himself at once.

"Talk to the real ones, or you're stuck talking to me."


	4. Chapter 4

He waits until the middle of the session, until every sideways attempt has been parried and thrown back at him, to move deliberately into what he thinks is most important.

"Why do you think your hallucinations took this form?"

"I don't know." House speaks almost on the beat of the question—too soon, and too simple.

"Try harder."

"Because. ..Look, they're dead. It sucked. Doesn't your training say anything about grief pathology?"

"Your father's dead too. More recently than Amber."

"That sucked less." Nolan cocks an eyebrow and leans back in the chair.

"Look, he was old. He had his time and…"

"And you didn't do it."

What flares in the blue eyes across from him is somehow more complicated than anger. "You think I killed Amber? Kutner?"

"No. But _you_ do, on some level so deep it shows up as insanity. Your father…there's a lot to unpack with that, but I don't think it's as relevant, right now, to what's gotten you here."

"All right then, what's gotten me here?"

"Among other things, a skewed self-perception and punishment complex so powerful that you have to externalize your own perceived mistakes to make them even more able to hurt you."

"You think I'm trying to do this?"

"Consciously? No. But I do think that, very deeply in the fiber of how you see yourself, there's an almost narcissistic focus on the ways you think you've screwed up--a belief that you can never redress any wrongs you may have committed. Which leads you on one level to try saving as many lives as possible to get a positive balance sheet on a different set of pages. And leads you on another level to constantly destroying your own life in order to feel like the world works how you think it should."

House sits with that for longer than he'd like to, unable in the end to find the hole in the argument. "Pretty well fucked, then. What's the solution?"

"Don't trivialize your situation by thinking there's a quick alternative. If there were, you would have found it already."

It feels good to hear the respect that grounds the words. House nods without realizing he's done it, and looks up as the psychiatrist speaks again.

"But there are ways to let something healthier into what you already have. You can recognize the other side of it, for example. Yes, for the moment, you are the sum of every bad thing you did. But that means you're also the sum of every good thing."

The bromide hits House like a punch to the chest. That a man who could have helped him now thinks it gets that easy. He snaps as he moves to his cane, to the door.

"Which dead fellow plays THAT half of the equation?"


End file.
